Bootstrapping Innovation Highlights

Toward High-Performing
People • Knowledge • Networks

While the opportunities, problems, and challenges we face keep increasing in complexity and urgency on a global scale, finding exponentially more powerful ways to collectively address important challenges is crucial. Organizations, initiatives, regions, and nations that kick into gear on this will likely surpass those that don’t.

Bootstrapping Innovation™ is a strategy for getting ahead of this curve,increasing innovation capacity while also continuously increasing Collective IQ. Five organizing principles offer unique insight, alignment and leverage for continuously expanding and accelerating results, with the potential for unprecedented gains in effectiveness, productivity, competitiveness, and triple-bottom-line success.

1.Focus on Capability: Especially Innovation and Collective IQ

  • Revisit your focus/horizon:“are wein the telegraph business or communications business?”
  • Drill down into that capability to reveal its tangible and intangible parts, identify otherwise hidden opportunities for innovation and leverage.
  • Innovating how people work collectively to solve important problems offers thegreatest leverage.

2.Engage Your Innovators: The ABCs of Innovation Networks

  • Engage target customers and other key stakeholders in your innovation team and network.
  • Map your organization’s key activities into (A) business as usual, (B) innovating how A work gets done, and (C) innovating how B work gets done -- i.e. improving how you innovate – to reveal additional opportunities for engagement and leverage.

3.Leverage Your Collective IQ: A Dynamic Knowledge Environment

  • Establish how your team/network will leverageits collective ingenuity and follow-through
  • Drill down into “Collective IQ” to reveal tangibleand intangible points of leverage, starting with shared values, vision, process, etc., and enabling tools that are open and evolvable
  • This becomes your dynamic knowledge environment, the equivalent of your group brain

4.Walk Your Talk: Bootstrapping Leverage

  • If you can use your products/services to leverage your Collective IQ in #3 above, you can amplify your multiplier effect like compounded interest.Being your own most demanding customer builds in a close-knit user-designer feedback loop, while every improvement you make to your products/services will automatically increase your Collective IQ, and vice versa.
  • The more your products/services contribute to increasing your Collective IQ, the greateryour potential to increase Collective IQ exponentially.

5.Push the Frontier: Accelerating Human/Tool Co-Evolution

  • Adopt a build-and-try pioneering attitude; innovate and experiment with both tangible and intangible elements in your test beds to accelerate co-evolution of human and tool elements.
  • Work closely with customers in advanced pilot trials.

You can apply any of theseaccelerators to any project to improve innovation in that project.However, the real magic is in forming an innovation team to apply all five, networking with existing innovation teams and initiatives to explore and share results. The idea is to start small, then scale up,branching out into something like an Innovation Neural Network™ infused with better and better practices and tools for boosting Collective IQ and innovation. At any point you cangreatly expand your network’s Collective IQ by tapping into analliance of Innovation Neural Networks.See Resources for Bootstrapping Innovation for details.

May 12, 2010 Bootstrapping Innovation:Christina Engelbart DEI